The Chairman, Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform (PTCLR), Professor Peter Adeniyi has assured land owners in the country not to panic over land reform, and said that it was not meant to repeal the Land Use Act, but to strengthen capacity for efficient administration of land.
Adeniyi told journalists in Kano that even though both the issue of indigeneship and ownership of land had been clearly spelt out in the nation’s constitution, disputes do occur due to certain primordial reasons.
He said it was for this and other issues that the committee was inaugurated to look into land matters in the country adding that the committee had come up with a pilot scheme for Kano and Ondo states in a bid to provide systematic identification and registration of title rights.
He further stated that the committee had been mandated to look into land matters in both rural and urban areas of the country with the objective of developing and testing a systematic approach to registration that would develop nationally acceptable procedures for land titling and registration.
Adeniyi said it was the hope of the committee to come up with measures that would bring to an end series of unfortunate incidences of communal clashes due to land ownership.
He assured that the federal government had no plan to seek for the repeal of the land use act or usurp state government’s powers or that of the local governments but had mandated the committee to aggregate their relationships.?